Essex Archaeological News,
Spring 1973 (No 42)
SAFFRON WALDEN.
Steven Bassett is the Director
of Excavations for the recently formed Saffron Walden Excavation Committee,
brought about as most excavation committees because of the development threat
in this historic town.
Although the principal impact
on the visitor to the town today, is the array of timbered houses of 15th and
16th century date, the layout of the town may well have been determined by a
Saxon town plan; and behind the scenes there is a motte and bailey castle (the
museum is in the bailey), and those enigmatic earth-works known as the Battle
Ditches.
Steven’s work has partly been
the excavation of the course of the perimeter earthwork. The Battle Ditches may
well be a 13th century earthwork, but this is now thought to be a recut of an
earlier boundary.
Excavation has shown what has
been interpreted as a formidable palisade trench, the posts being 15 to 18
inches in diameter, and buried 8 to 10 feet deep below ground level. Such a
palisade would have been of considerable height, and the mind boggles at the
amount of timber involved in a one and a third mile perimeter.
Having recently seen
photographs of a perfectly natural feature in chalk, which seemed to be a
perfect example of a palisade trench, and was due to the cracking of chalk
under ice age influence, I am inclined to be guarded about palisades. The
position of the finds may settle all this, of course.
As if chalk were not difficult
enough to work in the dry the sub soil elsewhere on site was brick earth.
Steven pays tribute to Paul
Drury's work at Little Waltham, which will be a classic example of a brick
earth site. The problem is that any back fill merges with the original subsoil,
and features are just not discern-able. The only method of attack is to scrape
the brick earth clean and leave it to weather. With time the differential damp
content and soil colour, will show up the fill and the feature may be seen.
There is nothing obvious about this form of archaeology.
The brick earth area at
Saffron Walden proved to have exclusively prehistoric features. The earliest
phase is a series of sub-rectangular and square, slot and posthole structures.
The pottery associated is possibly late Neolithic.
The later phases are Possibly
Iron Age, and fill has produced sherds similar to those from Little Waltham.
One feature is a circular gulley of some 10m radius, and the second a 10m
length of palisade ditch, in excess of 2m wide.
Work on the site continues.
There has been opportunity to
examine the bailey ditch, this suggesting that the ditch was rather a quarry to
provide spoil for the bank on the inner edge.
Clearly there is more to
Saffron Walden, and in Steven Bassett’s care we are confident that a maximum of
information will be extracted. Such care is essential since with such a varied
series of occupation periods the history of the place is rich and confused.
Only Roman evidence seems to
be scarce, although there are past reports of Romano-British burials. The
proximity of Great Chesterford seems to make the possibility of any major settlement
at Walden unlikely.
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